They say: J. Zunz - Hibiscus (Rocket Recordings) Due:21st August Mexican artist J. Zunz aka Lorena Quintanilla channels John Cage inspirations in new album Hibiscus. Delving into meditation and Buddhism, as well as artists including Sonia Delaunay, Lucio Fontana, Julio Le Parc, Duchamp, and futurism, expect electronics that verge on drone in its incantatory effect. See more here: Vinyl Factory ---
They say: WHEN the going gets tough … You know the rest. A summer that’s bust more than a few consciousnesses has proved the right conditions for Austin, Texas’s Craig Clouse, who records fractured drone-psych with a dancefloor edge as $hit & $hine, to lay down deep frazzled psych groove, which we can lose ourselves in come October 9th in the shape of his second album of the year, Malibu Liquor Store. And you can drink deep from his firewater in the shape of the video for teaser track “Hillbilly Moonshine”, at the end of this piece. The track crawls itself into being from the sonic slime and shapes into a phasing, deep psych pulse, with beaucoup de wow and flutter, winding and eerie psych guitars plucked from the ether, distorted curses, ringing telephones … And that video, grainy found footage solarised into acid colours, helps shift you off balance and deep into $hit & $hine’s psychoactive world where Suicide played at dawn at a rave. $hit & $hine says that he “ … cares not for your definitions of psych or dance music, and he’s never more comfortable than when transcending and annihilating both generic headspaces... Read the rest here: Backseat Mafia ---
The band say: Playing the first time live in six months. A little more and we would forget what Am, Dm, E is. We are seriously bored! Started this year with MENT Ljubljana, where we met the magical Lalalar, where due to powerful demand, we didn't push through. Oh, miracle, we're crossing them again at Moscow Music Week and finally we're underway! See you on September 2 at the opening of MMW in Aglomerate! What a line-up! More info here: Moscow Music Week ---
They say: THE typically fervid instrumentation of the Pigs x7 track “Hell’s Teeth”, which featured on their rapturously received 2020 album Viscerals, has been given a reworking by fellow Rocket Recordings artist J.Zunz. The throbbing guitar lines and bombastic percussion, not to mention the stirring “Let’s Rock” yell (as an ode to the history of metal bands), made it one of the countless highlights of their recent album.
The remix replaces the ravaging guitars with a brusque set of electronic swirls, a series of eerily choked vocals, as well as an intoxicating droning synth overlaying the track. The rework envelopes the track in an overwhelmingly more sumptuous and moody fog than the original... Read the rest here: Backseat Mafia ---
Bandcamp have announced they are going to continue their 'No Revenue' days for the rest of the year. So as always, today is a great time to buy some Rocket albums and shirts - 10 releases we wanna bring to your attention are: Shit and Shine – Malibu Liquor Store LP Ltd Red/Blue swirl vinyl GOAT – Commune LP Special ltd 'Silver edition' reissue on silver/blue swirl vinyl and new artwork Deafkids & Petbrick – Deafbrick LP We have put up some more copies of the splatter vinyl for sale J. Zunz – Hibiscus LP Ltd Blue/White swirl vinyl Autotelia – I LP Ltd Black/Whtre striped vinyl Petbrick – Remixes DL Killer album of very special remixes Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs – T-shirts Ltd 'Let's Rock' baseball shirts and 'King of Cowards' shirts GNOD – T-shirts The classic 'Just say no' on red or black, plus the ltd Trepanation shirts Sex Swing – Type II LP On Ltd edition swirl vinyl Kooba Tercu – Proto Tekno LP On Ltd edition clear vinyl + there are loads of other great things to pick up from the Rocket or individual bands Bandcamp stores: Bandcamp ---
Swedish psychedelic rock troupe GOAT annihilated the usual expectations surrounding ‘the difficult second album’ with the bigger and bolder cosmos of Commune. Ricocheting off the unanimous acclaim of their debut LP World Music - to say nothing of their earned star reputation for putting on a killer live show - the Korpilombolo bunch double down on their fuzzed-out riffs and modern ritualist practices. We are constantly asked to repress the currently out-of-print Commune LP again, so we have decided to release a ltd edition '2020' vinyl reissue of the album that features new and exclusive silver artwork and pressed on two versions of ‘Silver Swirl’ vinyl. The ltd edition LP will be available to preorder on 'Silver/Blue Swirl' from Friday (7 August) as part of the Bandcamp's 'No Fee' day from here: Bandcamp There will also be a 'Silver/Red Swirl' version being sold in all good record shops – Commune's opener ‘Talk to God’ begins with precisely this sense of holy ceremony, as singing bowls chime in reverent reception of whip-smart highlife licks and a thunderous drum-bass dialogue. ‘Goatchild’ and ‘Goatslaves’ sees paces and heart-rates quicken in the tumult of percussive hypnotism and fuzz-wah punctuations with extra-dimensional force. As if an amplification of their sonic fervour wasn’t enough, Commune finds GOAT widening their scope to greet the universe with open arms, contradiction and all - life and death, dark and light - as we’re told on ‘To Travel the Path Unknown’: “there is only one true meaning with life / and that is to be a positive force in the constant creation of evolution”. GOAT send their message of oneness home with blistering closer ‘Gathering of Ancient Tribes’, a riotous six-plus minute fireball which ends where Commune began with the same singing bowl chimes, forming the run-time of the LP into a perfect circle.
It is always exciting to announce a new $hit & $hine album and this, like the previous two albums he has released on Rocket, this shows $hit & $hine is once again at the top of his game. The new album 'Malibu Liquor Store' is released on 9 October and you can watch the eye-numbing video (created by Mike Bourne) for the incredible 10min+ 'kosmische-techno' track 'Hillbilly Moonshine', exclusively via The Quietus The Quietus 'Malibu Liquor Store' is available to preorder now on Blue/Red Swirl vinyl via the Bandcamp link below from Friday 7 August – to tie in with the next 'Bandcamp No-Fee' day: Bandcamp - The press release reads: $hit & $hine – Malibu Liquor Store So, what have you been doing in 2020? Tensions have mounted, turmoil has reigned and work emails have forever rung out with boilerplate platitudes as the world has ushered in a new decade in more uncomfortable and disquieting fashion than anyone could have imagined in January. Nonetheless, amidst such mental tumult Craig Clouse - the Austin-based sage of the aurally unclean also known as Shit & Shine – has been busily channelling the interface between the surroundings and his own wayward muse into ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ – a lockdown-birthed psychic landscape mapped out in the first half of this turbulent year. The only expectation any relatively well-adjusted person should have of Shit & Shine remains the unexpected at this stage, with Clouse having released well over thirty records on multiple labels in a storied, questing and uniformly invigorating catalogue – just as comfortable with both bloody-minded electronic assaults and noiserock-driven dirge, as adept at kraut-hammered rhythmic mantras as dancefloor-friendly abstraction. ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ is none of these things exactly yet simultaneously flirts cheerily and irreverently with all of them. Always shot through with gleeful humour, this is a sonic world that recognises neither boundaries nor common sense. Craig Clouse cares not for your definitions of psych or dance music, and he’s never more comfortable than when transcending and annihilating both generic headspaces with casual ease and cheerful panache. Instead, these heat-damaged jams mark a spectral collision course between infectious glitch-heavy groove and an appropriately Texan acid-flashback aesthetic - a world in the last fifty years of culture are reflected and refracted back ad absurdum. Co-ordinates and reliable audial landmarks are rendered meaningless as the title cut comes on like a ‘60s Morricone chase sequence reassembled in new electronic shapes like lysergically-assisted Meccano. ‘Rat Snake’ sees the humid grooves of Can’s ‘Soon Over Babaluma’ bludgeoned into delirious submission. ‘Devil’s Backbone’ witnesses Buttholes-esque transgressions of the ‘80s beamed forward Terminator-style to a cyborg-ridden dystopia, and the glorious skeletal groove of album centrepiece ‘Hillbilly Moonshine’ meanwhile is nothing less than workout music for the damned – a relentless and pulsating soundtrack for a generation of ghouls mounting a legion of rowing machines along a metaphysical river Styx. The creation of ‘Malibu Liquor Store’ may just have helped Craig Clouse keep his sanity in 2020, even if it appears custom designed to help us lose our own.
